Run To You
by SparklesInTheSun
Summary: Drabbles. Oh, what a tangled web we weave-and history's ties are ties that bind. Fem!nations. Tur/fem!Gree. Fr/fem!UK. Pru/fem!Aus. Spain/fem!Romano.
1. Sophia

**A/N: **This note applies to all chapters: italicized quotes are not mine. I have set up an account at the picture sharing website "we heart it" if you would like to see the pictures and quotes I reference for my interpretations of these characters. Google "we heart it" and click on the first link that comes up. Search for "oh_darling13" in the search bar. It will say nothing found, but click "Hearters" at the top. Click on my name and click "collections". Scroll down to see them all. Click the collection with the character's name on it and scroll down to see all the pictures I've collected that remind me/inspire this character for me. None of these pictures belong to me.

This story is called "Run To You" and is inspired by the Pentatonix song of the same name. I highly suggest you listen to it as you read.

* * *

Sophia sits on the sand of the beaches of her islands, from Santorini to the Dardanelles to Athens. _Greece._ Her eyes are sea green and drowsy, opening and closing slowly as she watches the waters wash into the Mediterranean. She remembers her mother, and Sadiq, and wishes amongst everything that she could forget.

_How strange to think we were once lovers._

_Never forget who you are._

_Sometimes beginnings aren't so simple. Sometimes goodbye is the only way._

And after everything she'd said, and after everything he'd _done_ to her, and _he didn't __understand__…_

_But you gave me wings. And I _used them.

_You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore._

_And oh,_ she thinks, as her heart sinks slowly to the sand, _but I _don't_, mother._

_It's a first love kind of thing. No matter how bad you hurt me, I'll never be over you._

_It's so hard to forget someone who gave you so much to remember…_

* * *

"A tornado flew around my room before you came,

excuse the mess it made, it usually doesn't rain in

Southern California, much like Arizona,

my eyes don't shed tears, but boy, they bawl,

when I'm thinkin' bout you."

~"Thinkin' About You," Frank Ocean

_Do you think about me still? _he wonders as he gazes towards the water flowing down the strait from the Black Sea. There's a reason Sadiq prefers Istanbul and the smaller towns outside it than Ankara. Regardless of how Co—_Istanbul _may affect him sometimes, there is some sort of thrill of watching the same water that he _knows_ she is watching, somewhere west of here, where the land changes from _his_ to _hers_, across the river where her mother once warned him to never cross, the river where her golden hair had vanished, the river he rode straight through when he heard screams and saw fire and found her little girl, but not her, the little girl with dark, fine hair and sea green eyes that were so similar to her mother's but different and—_oh_—

It's going to be one of _those_ nights again.


	2. Elizabeth

She's hurt him, really, and they both know it.

_Some people are meant to fall in love with each other, but not meant to be _together_._

You don't marry everyone you love.

Her beaches are cold, and dry, and far too close to him on one side for her to be comfortable, but it's better to look east and see a familiar pain than to look west and think of the bright, new, stinging pain as terrible as the dawn, to the ocean that gave her so much and cost her even more than that. To all the nations that had loved her, that she had loved, that could have loved her and done right by her as well…

…_but I'll choose _raw lust _over the possibilities of synthetic pleasure, every. damn. time._

And it's an addiction, and it's a curse, and they both wish they could say goodbye to each other _once and for all_ but they'll never be done, no—it, this, whatever it is, has permeated through Elizabeth and Francis, not just _England_ and _France_, anymore. Not anymore.

* * *

A phrase he's pretty sure he himself coined just for her always comes to his mind when he thinks about her. "La douleur exquise"—the heart-wrenching pain of wanting the affection of someone unattainable.

He watches the tides on his side of the channel with the same expression he has when he watches her kiss and flirt and laugh with other men, and the knowledge that though he has had her before she is not _his_ to have, that whatever their souls are made of, his and hers are the same, and he knows it and she knows it but neither of them _wants_ to know it, until it's two a.m. and it's all he can think of. The same two a.m. shared by poets writing sonnets for someone who's not there, for picturing Elizabeth in all her blonde, delicate, terrible glory drinking herself into amnesia to forget how everyone left. Two a.m. is for remembering, for Versailles, for Jeanne, for realizing that her _rise_ was prompted by his _fall_, and how he hated her and loved her so intensely it made his mind go numb, and how what he wants and what is real are two very different things.


	3. Maria

Gilbert can provoke a number of feelings in her, most of which she cannot put to name, but one she is pretty sure of is _wary_. She is wary of him, of the threat he presented, and still presents to this day.

_Music speaks when words can't._ And it is a philosophy that she lives by every day. But the thing about Gilbert that scares Maria the most is how he can speak this language, too. The words and the notes that she entrusted with her soul, that carried her gently off the cliff and blew warm wind to flutter her down safely, were her only solace in life. Gilbert could sing a song that, terrifyingly, only Maria could hear. And it made her wary.

They were not sure what to do with this development, as Gilbert circled Maria at her piano. Would they bring the fight here, as they did in meetings, in general, everywhere they both were? Could they agree on this one thing? …Could she trust him to carry her?

She warily played the first few notes of the song before he opened his mouth to sing. _Yes, it appears_, she breathed, _that he _can.

* * *

"Why do you never let anyone see this side of you?" she asks, mystified, as she sits at her piano.

Maria, in all honesty, is everything he _isn't_. She has nobles to impress with the sonatas she plays and he has battles to win. Simple as that.

So why, in all honesty, isn't it? Why isn't it that simple?

_Fuck if I know_, Gilbert thinks, and leaves it at that. Except he doesn't.

"When people see good, they expect good. And I don't want to have to live up to anyone's expectations," he said slowly, looking towards the ground. He keeps his gaze there even as Maria stands gracefully and walks towards him, and he counts her steps in time before she stops in front of him and he looks up.

"Kiss me," he whispers longingly, staring up at her face.

She blinks back at him. "I'm not yours to kiss."

He stands slowly, and she eyes him warily. "Good thing I'm not a good man, then."


	4. Lovina

**A/N:** This chapter is different from the rest, but since I wrote it for the collection from weheartit, I decided to include it. May or may not write more drabbles for any pairing in the future, just testing the waters.

What she has with him, isn't healthy. She'll be the first to admit it.

She should have left Spain when she had the chance, packed her bags and moved out.

Which she did. Technically. She got control of herself and moved to Rome.

And then she spent all of her time at Antonio's house, making him cook for her and bossing him around and he'll do it and she doesn't know why.

Well, no. She does know. She knows he does it because he thinks it's the only way she'll love him, that he is happy and cheerful and naïve, and she is sulky and rude and pessimistic, and that's how Lovina likes it.

But then…then there are time when it's not like that. Not like that at all. There are times when he is cold and harsh and calculating, and she is tense and wary and above all, afraid.

Afraid of what he could do to her. Afraid of how much power he really has. Afraid of how far he would go when he grabs her arms and pushes her against the wall.

But most of all, she's afraid that she'll like it.

She knows she should leave him, and that their relationship was unhealthy anyway, never mind that he could seriously hurt her when he started having flashbacks of his time as _el Imperio Español_. But she can't just _leave_ him. They have too much between them for that.

Antonio had taken her in and raised her, basically, had given her his language and his culture and had infused his raw passion into everything he did for her. She couldn't just wake up and _not_ know Spanish. She couldn't forget the sights and sounds of Madrid, or the tides of the ocean in Barcelona, or how far it was by boat to travel from Valencia to Sicily.

Lovina knew she had messed up, when the lines had blurred in the middle of wars and everything rolled together in one messy, confusing ball of emotions and she had said things she couldn't take back and then they were too tied together to do anything but love each other, really. If it was actually love.

So maybe she did a little of it on purpose. Maybe she was a little extra difficult and maybe she skewed a few lines to tie him to her even more. Because Lovina is nothing but insecure, and suspicious, and always wondering if she was good enough to be loved. And if she's not, or Antonio is getting tired of her insults and her pessimism, she'll know he could never seriously leave her because they have too much history tying them together. They have something to fall back on, an excuse not to leave. (Or an excuse to beg him to stay.)

And she was so desperate and so insecure from such a young age that when Antonio came back from the New World and took an intense and almost eerie interest in her, her thirteen-year-old self took it and turned it into something strong and real and something that looked like love and she thought was "love" but it really wasn't.

_Mi tesoro_, he'd call her. My treasure. Was that all she was to him? Just a trophy, just a jewel in his collection, as it were?

Lovina stroked her collarbone softly as she unconsciously played with a necklace that wasn't there.

She could still remember it perfectly, the way he'd looked her up and down slowly in her red velvet dress; the corset Bella had just made her start wearing beckoned to him almost as much as the fingers he'd crooked toward her summoned her to him.

And so she had gone, and his eyes were dark and intense, tainted with faint red apprehension and smooth black fear as she approached him, and his gaze lingered on her collarbones as he told her about the present he had for her form the New World. She'd blinked and swallowed down the black and red and turned around on command, feeling his rough, tan fingers tracing the back of her neck as he placed the gold and ruby necklace around her neck, his breath ghosting over her skin as she examined it with wide eyes. She knew where he'd gotten this. She wanted to ask him how many natives he'd killed to get it, shuddering as she pictured the blood that must have been on it, but when she turned back around and saw the look in his eyes, she was too afraid to ask.


End file.
